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The local news site was actually live tracking the progress of her flight earlier. Anyone who has read So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed will hear uncomfortable echoes of Justine Sacco’s story, and feel a twinge of sympathy. Then they’ll remember who it is and that she has brought everything on herself and get over it.

On a more serious note, there is something a bit weird and unnerving about this entire event.

I’m sure Ms Patel is a really horrible individual, but it appears that rolling news is allowing us to track her journey to the sack from flight to passport control to car and on to Downing Street. There’s something a bit ghoulish about all the reveling in someone else losing their job, even if it is with bloody good reason.

I’m fairly sure not even OJ Simpson’s fall from grace attracted this level of immediate scrutiny, and he actually did kill someone and flee the law. What a strange, rubbernecking society we’ve become.*

I think some cogs slipped in the collective mind of the political media at the last election. They all, more or less, predicted a big majority for the Conservatives and humiliation for Labour. They were furious when this didn’t work out, and started predicting Theresa May’s immediate resignation. They are now getting more and more annoyed about being wrong again, and seem to think that all this hysteria will make it happen.

Priti Patel is a controversial British celebrity. She first rose to celebrity via an appearance on Gogglebox, in which she loudly berated the cast of Eastenders as layabouts before explaining during a segment on the news that foreign people don’t really exist.

Her subsequent career has relied on a combination of political rhetoric and sensationalism, and she’s kept herself in the public eye via a series of stunts, including scaling Big Ben bare handed, and attempting to eat the Millennium Wheel. Last year she was arrested pretending to be a statue in Parliament Square, and the subsequent bad press marked something of a turning point.

In April 2017, Patel was arrested again, this time for peeing in the Thames, and insulting the design of the five pound note. She also issued a manifesto on ways in which the London Underground map should be improved, and made a series of facetious public suggestions on who should be cast as the next Dr Who.

In late Summer, she once again courted controversy by posting a hand drawn caricature of Paddington bear being eaten by lions, and she followed this up by being caught on camera jumping the queue at Wimbledon.

From that point, it was only a matter of time until she’d be forced to resign her post as Minister for Britishness, but she probably hastened the end earlier this week by being photographed dumping garlic into the national water supply.

Went on holiday to Israel
Held a bunch of unofficial meetings in her role as Minister for International Development
Talked about funding the Israeli Army with UK overseas aid
Didn’t tell her boss (Boris Johnson) or No. 10 about the meetings beforehand
Told everyone she had told her boss
Said that when she told everyone she had told her boss, she didn’t mean that she had actually told her boss
Admitted she’d had more meetings than she’s originally said
Suggested that No. 10 had told her not to mention some of the meetings
Got summoned home for Africa to meet the PM later tonight
…and that ‘s just this week

There’s probably a certain amount of schadenfreude in the coverage as she’s one of the “inside the tent pissing out” hardcore Brexiteers in the government. Except that she seems to have been pissing not merely out of the tent but absolutely everywhere (see ^ Mr Little’s comprehensive account)

Here is what Hansard records him saying to the Foreign Affairs Commmittee on 1 November:

‘I have raised this case many times now with Javad Zarif, my Iranian counterpart. When we look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it, at the very limit.’

Here is what he said in the House yesterday:

‘My point was that I disagreed with the Iranian view that training journalists is a crime, not that I wanted to lend any credence to Iranian allegations that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been engaged in such activity. I accept that my remarks could have been clearer in that respect, and I am glad to provide this clarification…..Of course I am sorry if any words of mine have been so taken out of context and so misconstrued as to cause any kind of anxiety for the family of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe—of course I am.’

So what he said wasn’t wrong; he is now ‘clarifying’ his comments which were ‘taken out of context’ and ‘misconstrued’. What exactly needs clarifying and could be misconstrued about a statement on the record that ‘she was simply teaching people journalism’?

But Johnson can’t bring himself to say what is self-evidently the case – that he made a mistake. And therefor he doesn’t apologise, because he did nothing wrong. This isn’t being economic with the truth, it is a blatant lie and an attempt to rewrite history about something which is on the record. It is utterly shameless.

Nah, you can’t stand for office over here if you have non-oz citizenship. At least thats what i assume ‘koala bollock munching’ would be, a euphemism for high orifice. Not too much jungle round here though.

No, it was a cryptic reference to the inevitable appearance on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here that tends to follow a fall from grace. I’m pretty sure no koala bollocks are harmed during the making of the programme, but quite a few grubs get munched. Filmed somewhere behind the Gold Coast.

We all know what will happen next. She’ll sit out the headlines and walk into a consultancy position for an arms manufacturing company, where she can use her government contacts to help Israel get hold of all the stuff that she’s just had to resign for trying to sort out for them in the first place, only this time she’ll pick up a ludicrous cheque for doing so (which will almost certainly disappear into some offshore labyrinth to emerge miraculously unscathed by any taxes). Makes me despair.
Bring on the apocalypse, I’d rather live in Mad Max than this venal shitshow.

She’s my soddin’ MP – Witham, where the two sides of Essex meet – the Tory shire set and white working class exports from East London. Her majority in this year’s election was larger than the vote for all other candidates. She’ll have a job for life.

Irregardless of whether one is in possession of a dexterous vocabulary and a rapacious capacity for perspicacity, one must inevitably ask the question: what the bloody hell are “big”, as opposed to “long” words? All caps?

I thought Fry and Laurie was funny, and Stephen Fry was an amusing host on QI and a good presenter on the radio programmes about language he used to do. But I find his books unreadable. It’s not so much the length of words, but the amount of them, particularly in triple combinations, as he attempts to elucidate, elaborate and illuminate. It’s odd as his avowed heroes are two of the most concise writers – Wodehouse and Wilde. He reads like someone who has formed an idea of Wilde’s writing just by reading about his perceived image – camp and flowery – whereas his work is the opposite.

My God, I thought 280 characters was stretching things for the World’s Most Poisonous Internet Platform.
I sent two Tweets in my entire Twitter life – both to disappointment Bob as it happens – one saying I probably won’t keep using this, it looks like it will suck, and a second saying that I was right the first time.

The phrase “big, long words” was a deliberate poke at those who fall at the feet of the awful Eton/Harrow/Oxbridge “elite” we have in this country.
“Oh, look, big, long words, he MUST be clever.”
Johnson et al thrive on that ignorance.

As I get older I find it depressing to see politicians such as Patel who are younger than me and have no apparent experience in real life work. A Google search shows she went straight from uni into a Conservative Party researcher position then worked as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco … and then an MP. This qualifies her to be a minister of state? No sympathy.

Well… grew up in a newsagents, went to a comprehensive school and a shit university (Keele), worked for 10 years in PR and corporate affairs. In many ways she was the perfect Tory candidate – female, Asian, not posh, not an Oxbridge PPE SPAD. And at 45, she’s two years older than Blair was when he became prime minister. She’s got some horrible views but presumably they’re in line with her party’s and the people who elected her.

Whilst on politicians, did anyone catch Michael Fabricant (or Flabbyc*nt as my wife calls him) on Sleb First Dates? Christ on a bike, what a creeeeeeeeeeep. As a constituent I had always forgiven him his appearance, even, almost, his Brexit beliefs, so good a constituency MP does he seem to be, irrespective of politics. But he is a ghastly toe-curling oleaginist of beyond any belief. Yuk, I cannot expunge the taste from my mouth, second hand even, through the medium of telly.